Class Matters: Chapters 11–15

They emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, when tectonic shifts in the economy created mountains of wealth.

They resemble the arrivistes of the Gilded Age, which began in the 1880s when industrial capitalists amassed staggering fortunes, except that there are so many of them and they seem to be relatively anonymous.

Once a low-key summer resort, Nantucket is rapidly turning into their private preserve, joining the ranks of other enclaves like Palm Beach, Aspen, the Hamptons, and Sun Valley.

“And in case you don’t know, they want to tell you with a lethal combination of houses, cars, and diamonds.”

The accoutrements of wealth play a different role for the old-money clans than they do for the new wealthy

“For many self-made men,” Aldrich said, “homes, boats, and even membership in expensive clubs are trophy signs of wealth. But for the older money, a boat may well be part of a tableau that has to do with family, with his grandparents and his children.

Ultimately, the new money becomes as insular as the old money because it gains the power to exclude

Roger Penske, the automotive tycoon and former race car driver, tussled for months with the Historic District Commission until he finally won permission to build a faux lighthouse that joins the two wings of his multimillion-dollar home.

With some of their fortunes eroding, they find they are sitting on an extremely valuable asset, a realization that adds a touch of ambivalence to their protests against changes that are all too obvious.

They separate the community, contributing to the ineffable sense that something familiar and precious about the ethos of the island is disappearing.

But some harbingers horrify the old-timers: upscale restaurants, boutique windows displaying expensive designer jewelry, and the arrival of the first-ever chain store, a Ralph Lauren shop.

The new money wears Juicy Couture, Calypso, and big necklaces.

So in 1995, Edmund A. Hajim, an investment banker in Manhattan, and others created the Nantucket Golf Club, assiduously designed to look as if it had been around forever.

In the old days, the clubs were homogenous and dominated by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant families.

One Nantucketer was L. Dennis Kozlowski, the former chief executive of Tyco International, who in 2005 was convicted on charges of criminal larceny.

To some, the multimillion-dollar party that Kozlowski gave on Sardinia to celebrate his wife’s birthday—replete with a vodka-spewing ice sculpture fashioned after Michelangelo’s David—was a modern echo of the lavish celebrations of the Gilded Age.

He likes it here because there are Wall Street moguls everywhere and wherever he goes he can talk business.

Some real estate agents worry that the hyper-rich will resent the tax, but so far wealthy homebuilders seem to regard it as a pittance compared with the other costs they incur.

I had a monogrammed tray and when I proposed it to a customer, she said, ‘Why would I want other people’s monograms?’

When F. Scott Fitzgerald pronounced that the very rich “are different from you and me,” Ernest Hemingway’s famously dismissive response was: “Yes, they have more money.”

But some of the wealthiest Americans, including Warren E. Buffett, George Soros, and Ted Turner, have warned that such a concentration of wealth can turn a meritocracy into an aristocracy and ultimately stifle economic growth by putting too much of the nation’s capital in the hands of inheritors rather than strivers and innovators.

In the upstate New York town of Lycurgus, where the story takes place, Dreiser reminds us that “the line of demarcation and stratification between the rich and the poor was as sharp as though cut by a knife or divided by a high wall.”

But more often the upper class is portrayed these days as a little beleaguered and merely trying to hang on

In other versions of the story the upper-class person is merely thawed and humanized by the poorer one, but in every case the exchange is seen as fair and equitable, with the lower-class character giving as much as he or she gets in return.

If you believe the novels of Dickens or Thackeray, say, the people who feel most at home in Britain are those who know their place, and that has seldom been the case in this country, where the boundaries of class seem just elusive and permeable enough to sustain both the fear of falling and the dream of escape.

Whitiker was struck by his manners and how he spoke like the teachers and social workers she had known growing up—enunciating his words, slipping in a few she didn’t know.

She endured the stares of the middle-class teacher’s pets who looked down on her for the circuitous route that got her there.

Because she wasn’t from a professional family, she brought a kind of naivete to school with her.

Soon she was working with cadavers as if they were just another piece of office equipment, but she didn’t know anyone who could give her the ins and outs of the field or tell her what to expect.

There were times when Allen, on patrol and by then Nicholas’s putative stepfather, would catch him on the street and write up a summons but then let him go.

Because of high rates of joblessness and incarceration among black men, marriage is not a viable option for many poor single mothers.

“Blacks are much more likely to live near poor segregated areas. They are much less insulated from crime and other manifestations of social disarray that grow from racial exclusion.”

That is the most shocking greeting of all, because Birmingham is also known as the Johannesburg of America, the national bastion of apartheid.

And one of the markers of my father’s class rebellion is that he is so “outspoken” against members of Joe’s race that he actually uses the N-word, which is verboten among polite southerners except when they are out of earshot of the children.

Class awareness, if you could call it that, seemed to fall more along the lines of aesthetics and experience than any bald expression of affluence.

And in a continuation of the reverse whammy, I also began spinning tales about my (truly pedestrian) upbringing, some apocryphal, some with just a little narrative topspin to tidy up the endings.

The rough, undiscerning democracy among prepubescent males was leavened by a narcissism of small differences of speech, color, dress, ambitions, etc., none too subtly imparted by watchful mothers whose silent prayer was, “There but for the grace of God ...”

We were people of consequence in the eyes of both “races,” a family who lived, therefore, under the discipline of a double mandate: to be pillars, straitlaced and self-conscious, of social uplift in the community of color; and to serve, at best, as ameliorating agents of relations between the races and, at worst, as hired professionals of the Jim Crow order.

In less than a year, as I remember it, our family went from the top of the social heap to pariah status in the dominant community and to an awkward presence as unemployables among its own racial group.

From this profoundly instructive trauma, I learned to assume the permanent possibility that, however solid the middle-class reinforcements, race could trump class in my life experience.